I knew negative SEO existed, but always assumed it was in the more profitable and highly contested areas of the net, but the case study on how justgoodcars.com tanked has scared me. I work for a company with hundreds of employees, all with families and mortgages. What in the world can I do to protect our site from negative SEO?

I had always thought there is nothing you can do to protect yourself if a competitor wanted to destroy you with negative SEO, but now I want to find out if that is still the case or if there is something you can do. Please help!

If someone wants to put your sites link on 10-20 cheap domains, and then after a week delete your link from those sites. Those domains will be deindexed within 30 days and your site will get a hefty -10000 penalty, there really is nothing you can do.

Man don't worry about it. You will probably just be worrying about something that will never happen.

Alternatively you set up a second site and try to rank that also, at least you are making it twice as difficult for anyone to come along and wreck your business. Keep the adwords then during the time you need to work on rankings if the worst happens then just up the budget, easy to say but I know this is not currently a major issue. If something like this does happen then obviously one of your competitors has done it so do it to everyone on the page one.

Then within a month or two evey site on the interweb will have a negative campaign going

If Google views your site as an authority site with lots of links with lots of different anchor text coming from lots of sites that aren't bad neighborhoods, one guy sending a ton of scrapebox links won't be able to put a sizable dent in your already developed backlink profile.

But the real answer is, don't worry about it. The odds of negative SEO happening to you are very close to 0%.

I'm sure this is changing a little bit but most SEOers do not do any negative SEO whatsoever. I'm sure some people on TrafficPlanet are, and maybe some people outside of TrafficPlanet, but out of the whole SEO community that probably totals up to less than 0.1% of SEOers who actively do negative SEO. And since you are not always competing against SEOers for top spots I would say that the odds of you going up against somebody who is going to use negative SEO to try to knock your site offline is basically 0.

Plus negative SEO is probably one of the worst ways to take care of a competitor. There are so many things that could go wrong (such as you helping the competitor out). If somebody really wants to knock you off the top of Google and would rather do it by hurting you instead of helping themselves, they'll be far more likely to do something like spoofing spam complaints from your site and geting your hosting company to take your site offline (and this method is basically unpreventable and doesn't have the possible accidental side effect of helping the site you're trying to hurt).

Negative SEO is getting blown into something way bigger than it actually is.

I knew negative SEO existed, but always assumed it was in the more profitable and highly contested areas of the net, but the case study on how justgoodcars.com tanked has scared me. I work for a company with hundreds of employees, all with families and mortgages. What in the world can I do to protect our site from negative SEO?

I had always thought there is nothing you can do to protect yourself if a competitor wanted to destroy you with negative SEO, but now I want to find out if that is still the case or if there is something you can do. Please help!

It's very, very unlikely that justgoodcars.com was hit by negative seo. All the evidence points to their own spammy SEO techniques catching up on them and their traffic drop coincides exactly with when panda hit the UK on April 11 2011.

Decrease your reliance on google. If you have a website that only earns via its serp with G then you are likely under monetized and certainly not viable in long term. There is plenty of money in being top of G for a search term and its a great earner but its also not a solid foundation. As most competitive websites are vulnerable to algorithm changes, negative-seo in all forms, or evening being reported.

So the only protection is to become less google reliant and begin sending a lot of positive off site messages out, via social networks, backlink profiles, and activity. My feelings anyway.